U.S. Army Spc. Eric Buffington, top, helps a General Dynamics mechanic and 2 other soldiers install slat armor on a Stryker on Monday in Kuwait.
They couldn't have done this at Fort Lewis and shipped them with the armor already on?
Posted on 11/19/2003 5:11:35 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
CAMP UDAIRI, Kuwait - Pfc. Gerard Minnitto normally packs a light machine gun, but these days the Stryker brigade infantryman from Tacoma is turning a wrench.
He's among the soldiers and General Dynamics contractors working around the clock to bolt slat armor onto the brigade's fleet of more than 300 Strykers before they move up into Iraq.
The armor - each looking like a great green cage - is meant to protect the $2 million vehicles and the soldiers inside from rocket-propelled grenades. The inexpensive shoulder-fired RPGs are ubiquitous in Iraq and have killed dozens of U.S. troops.
Naturally, Minnitto and his buddies hope the awkward-looking steel contraptions will do the trick, absorbing the worst of the RPGs like a catcher's mask does a baseball. They're optimistic, although a bit skeptical.
And when you get right down to it, there's only one way to find out for sure.
"When I see the first time an RPG hits it," the Mount Tahoma High School graduate said, "then I'll know whether it works."
The idea behind the cage armor goes back at least to his days in Vietnam, said John Funk, the General Dynamics logistics support manager. Troops in that war improvised with chicken wire and other means to counter the RPG threat.
The idea is to detonate the grenade away from the vehicle and prevent its hot chemical reaction from boring through and causing burns, shock and shrapnel wounds.
The Army is working with General Dynamics, the Stryker manufacturer, on a kind of plate armor that will defeat RPGs. But that's not due until the Army develops the third of its six planned Stryker brigades in 2005.
The Army and the contractor have been working on the interim slat armor solution for about nine months, said Maj. Todd Thomas from the Stryker program management office at the U.S. Army Tank and Automotive Command in Warren, Mich.
Thomas has deployed to Kuwait with the brigade and will go north with it to Iraq, where he will work out of a repair and maintenance yard.
So will about 50 of the 100 or so General Dynamics mechanics who are working with about 50 Stryker soldiers to prepare the vehicles for combat duty. For now, they're set up in two new "sprung shelters" - big bubble hangars with room to comfortably fit eight Strykers each.
The work, which began last week, ought to take about 14 days, Thomas said. He doesn't know how much the additional armor cost to develop and install.
The soldiers are mostly infantrymen like Minnitto, temporarily assigned to the slat armor detail.
"It sounds good to me," said Pfc. Gabriel Deroo, a light machine gunner from Paw Paw, Mich. "I mean, any extra armor is good."
Spc. Rod "Buster" Potter, a Stryker vehicle commander from Caldwell, Idaho, said he gets the concept behind the armor. But he said he'd feel better if he'd seen a live test demonstration or a video of the slats in action.
Thomas said the armor has been tested.
"They did test it, and it did very well in testing," he said. "We have a high sense of confidence."
The extra armor weighs about 5,200 pounds, [emphasis Cannoneer No. 4's] about 3,000 pounds lighter than the add-on anti-RPG armor that's under development for later Stryker brigades, said Howard Warner, another official with the General Dynamics logistics support team.
Soldiers said they figure the heavy armor cages, sticking a foot and a half off the front, rear and sides, may cut into the Stryker's speed and maneuverability.
But they recounted an incident from their last training exercise before they left Fort Lewis in which a Stryker hit a ditch and was saved from rolling over by the bulky slat cage.
And while some think the cage is ugly, Potter said he thinks it might help discourage adversaries in Iraq.
"I think it looks intimidating," he said.
Ugly. Intimidating. Whatever.
"I don't care what it looks like," said Pvt. Joshua Blankenship, "as long as it keeps us safe."
Michael Gilbert: mjgilbert41@yahoo.com
(Published 12:01AM, November 19th, 2003)
U.S. Army Spc. Eric Buffington, top, helps a General Dynamics mechanic and 2 other soldiers install slat armor on a Stryker on Monday in Kuwait.
They couldn't have done this at Fort Lewis and shipped them with the armor already on?
Limits return field of fire,vehicle tires can still be disabled and vehicle with occupants burned with ordinary Molotov Cocktails.
Hope no one gets hurt.
Best regards,
What, and give up air mobility?
Why do I get the impression we just bought a Cadillac for $10k over dealer invoice with pre-dented fenders?
The idea behind the cage armor goes back at least to his days in Vietnam, said John Funk, the General Dynamics logistics support manager. Troops in that war improvised with chicken wire and other means to counter the RPG threat.
It’s too bad that there are no (or very few) Viet Nam Vets in Iraq. The people over there made a lot of improvements on the cheap – and the improvements worked. This new armor will weigh 5,200 pounds! I’d be willing to bet that if left to the troops, it would be a lot lighter, far less costly and work just as well.
This brings to mind the “new” gun trucks being made for Iraqi convoy escort duty. It’s sleek and high tech. It looks pretty, and there should be a couple ready in a few months. The old ugly gun trucks made by the troops in Nam worked great, were relatively cheap, took only a couple days to assemble and would work just as good in Iraq for convoy escort.
You know the formula for figuring standoff diatance for a shaped charge? And the depth to which a PG-7V rocket charge will penetrate?
-aschy-/-
Not quite. The idea of the *fencerails* is for the PG7V warhead to pass between the slats and get dented, which will dead short the firing circuit between the piezo crystal in the nose and the detonator ans booster at the base rear of the charge. THe PG7 uses the outside metal body as one conductor, the copper or aluminum charge liner as the other. If they touch, the round is a dud.
The chainlink used in Vietnam caused the warheads to not detonate about 50% of the time. Problem is, the Stryker tops aren't covered, and there are plenty of roofs in Tikrit.
It's better than no armor at all, and it'll make a handy rack for rucks anmd boxes of MREs. But forget about transporting Strykers in-theater by C130 now.
-archy-/
Business is really picking up in the city, they are cleaning the streets, rebuilding the shops, and free enterprise is beginning to catch on, but slowly. For most of their lives, someone has told them what to do, how much they can charge, what they can grow, build, and do. There are hundreds of great stories out here, if I were just working for a news agency that would run them.
Arm those folks, and help them take their country back from the Saddamites and foreign Jihadist American haters. It'll prove we trust them as brothers and as a fellow free people.
Otherwise it'll prove we don't.
-archy-/-
They didn't test with PG-7 rockets, just small arms projectiles. And got penetration from 7.72 AK47 rounds, when fired from the 24-inchj barrel of the RPK SAW. We won't mention what the 12.7x108mm *Russian Fifty* and 14.5mm slugs did, but that was when they announced the *flawed armor supplied by subcontractors.*
Standoff distance for a Monroe Effect shaped charge is 2½ times the cone diameter. The PG7's outside diameter is 93mm, the charge itself is 85mm. So 85mm+85mm+ half of 85mm= 212.5mm or about 8.36 inches- call it 8 and a half inches total. The nose of a PG-7 rocket isn't 8.5 inches ahead of the front face of the 2-kilo, 4.4 pound shaped charge, so the extra standoff distance from the Stryker slats will focus the explosive effect better than a hit against bare armor, not worse. Penetration of a PG7's charge is up to 14inches of steel armor, and Stryker's ½-inch armor is NOT going to pose any protection from the ones that do go off.
So what we've done is make it likely that around half the rockets that hit Strykers won't go off. But the ones that do, will actually work better.
-archy-/-
We carried ours rolled on the outside of the tracks, with two or three poles inside, until we found out that an RPG that hit a roll so carried worked better than one that struck bare armor. After that, we carried them rolled on top. Same deal with the Sheridans.
The real weak point of the M113 was the plastic bag hung between the driver's side interior and exterior wall that served as the fuel tank. Hit by a PG-7 rocket, or the more common RPG-2/B-40 they went up in a fireball. The Diesel M113A1 was a much-appreciated improvement over the mogas/ gasoline Chevy engine versions.
Some of the Russian BTR 80 and BMP troop carries seen in Chechnya have been carrying sections of pipe, sometimes filled with water, on the sides. Since the wheeled BTRs have their crew exit doors on the sides, that's unhandy, but the crews and troops ride on top, anyway, due to mines. The bigger MTLB and tank-derived APCs sometimes have fuel drums slung alongside. Interestingly A RPG-7 hit on a 55-gallon drum full of Diesel usually doesnt ignite, though it sure leaks good.
Good point. But still, better late than never.
BTW, can anyone differentiate for me between Bradley Fighting Vehicules, Coyote, Stryker? Thanks.
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